Is a word borrowed from the Greek verb meaning ‘pointing’ or ‘indicating’. In pragmatics

TASK 1

1.1The process of communication, which involves the speaker and the addressee, occurs in a specific spatio-temporal situation. The speaker, who organizes the interaction, wishes to convey to or/and obtain information from the addressee. The addressee is not only the receiver of information; the addressee is also the giver of information. In this respect the speaker and the addressee enjoy a similar status: both are partners in this informational exchange. However, it is the speaker who ‘commands the parade’. His or her duty is to present a situation. Any situation necessarily involves the identification of entities, processes and circumstances, or, to use a more familiar term, the process of reference. The addressee must know what and which entity or process the speaker has in mind. To help the addressee, the speaker resorts to the use of specific linguistic forms called deixis, or indexicals, i.e. structures whose meaning is relative to a specific situation. Metaphorically speaking, these structures act as road sings to speakers in a spatio-temporal area. They, as it were, localize a ‘set the situation in a frame’.

1.2Deixis is a word borrowed from the Greek verb meaning ‘pointing’ or ‘indicating’. In pragmatics,deixis is a term used to denote a word or a phrase which directly refers to entities (objects, processes, attributes, and circumstances). In other words, deictic expressions are used by the speaker to refer to or identify entities in both non-linguistic and linguistic situation.

1.3      Person deixis is based on a three-part division: first person, second person, and third pertson (neither speaker nor addressee). In some languages (Uzbek, Russian, German, French), second person pronouns have two forms: one used to refer to the addressee with a lower social status, and the other used to refer to the addressee with a higher social status: сен; сиз; ты, вы. The deictics I, you are pure deictics: they refer to the speaker and the addressee respectively without conveying other information. The deictics he, she, it are impure deictics: besides the third person meaning, they include information concerning gender.

Third persons (he, she, it, they) differ from firt and second person in several respects: the speaker and the addressee are necessarily present in the situation while the others may be absent or if they are present they are not active in the communicative act, i.e. they are listeners, or the audience. Of course, they may be drawn into the act of communication, and thus they may become speakers and addressees.

E.g.           A: Who is “he/she”?

                  B: He/she is our teacher.

In this interaction, he/she are used without their antecedents, i.e. the way the deictics are used in a non-linguistic situatiling

1.4 Spatial deixis is related to the concept of distance. It identifies an entity by relating it to its place which is established with reference to the deictic center. So, for instance, when the speaker says, the book here, he or she means the book close to him or her. When he or she says that book, he or she means the book further away. Spatial deixis also concerns the direction of motion, e.g. She has come (motion towards the deictic center) or She has gone (motion away from the deictic center). Location from the speaker’s perspective can be fixed not only physically; it can be fixed mentally, too, e.g. I will come later. In this utterance, the speaker projects himself / herself into his or her home location, i.e. when he or she says I will come later, he or she, as it were, visualizes himself or herself in the location which is treated as the deictic center. Consider the following situation: before leaving for work, I put the following information into the recorder of my telephone answering machine: I am not here now. When someone calls me later, the machine says I am not here now. Now is the time somenone calls me later, and not the time of my recording of the words. This shift of the deictic center is referred to as deictic projection.

As already said, spatial deixis is related to distance. Entities can be palced close to the speaker or further away from the speaker. Hence there are two types of spatial deixis distinguished: proximal and distal.

E.g.

I don’t like this film.

I don’t like that film.

1.5

Words like here,there,this that indicate distanceand proximity of the speaker ,physical distance or proximity,mental and psychological distance or proximity:

Ex: The station is two hundred yards from the college

Bring that here and take this there

Place deixis, also known as space deixis concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations may be either those of the speaker and adressee or those of persons or objects being referred to.

Pragmatic basis of spatial deixis is actually named as psychological distance

It can be understood in the terms of

-Objects physically close

Example

This cat sitting here is lovely.